Misadventures of a Cope Volunteer. Michiel le Roux
I was left to follow up, usually without success.
In stark contrast to the lethargy and apathy I encountered at government projects, great things seemed to happen at TSiBA, where I volunteered as a lecturer and tutor. TSiBA, an acronym for the Tertiary School in Business Administration, is a private initiative founded by four go-getters with a shared passion for education and a mission to improve lives. The institution was only a year old when I joined, but had already achieved amazing things. The students were confident, articulate and clued-up, the facilities were fancy and the staff motivated. The curriculum reached beyond conventional academic subjects and was tailored to address the issues specific to TSiBA’s students: ‘scaffolding’ subjects like professional communication, career planning and life skills were compulsory. The directors knew about every student’s problems and made great efforts to resolve them.
TSiBA wasn’t perfect. Several students dropped out, unable to cope academically or under pressure from their families to start earning money. Nonetheless, TSiBA improved more lives than 90% of the government projects I dealt with that year. The only fundamental difference between TSiBA and the government projects, as far as I could tell, was the instigators’ bloody-minded commitment to empowerment.
My contrasting experiences through Impumelelo and TSiBA left me sceptical about the ability of our government to effect real change. Though there were some amazing people in government doing wonderful jobs, there weren’t enough of them. Many state officials did not seem to have the desire to spend government money effectively and achieve the type of sustainable development that would lift people out of poverty. Without the right people our government’s development state model was destined to fail. This was a concerning realisation for someone who always assumed that, in the new South Africa, poor people’s lives were improving every day. The insight stuck with me, and no doubt contributed to a growing desire to become involved in the world of politics.
To appreciate the impact that the formation of Cope had on the South African political landscape and to understand why there was such hype around the party, one has to understand something of the political evolution of post-apartheid South Africa. The significance of the decision by a few ANC leaders to jump ship and to form a rival movement should not be underestimated. It’s only properly assessed in the light of the history of the liberation movement, post-1994 political rivalry, the ANC’s awkward attempt to accommodate all political creeds from centre-right to far left, the personalisation of politics, and, perhaps most importantly, in view of the great face-off between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.
The formation of Cope represented a great deal more than a mere political defection. To many, some of whom would never even consider voting for this new party, it represented a promise of change: a realisation that ‘things don’t have to go on like this forever’. Particularly to those who felt marginalised under ANC rule, Cope suddenly presented the possibility of an alternative.
For a number of ANC members, the birth of Cope was a vindication of growing unease about the direction in which their party was heading. For an even larger number of disempowered non-ANCs, it presented an opportunity to find a political home. And for a few politically discarded old-timers, it was a chance for a last hurrah in their fight against the ANC.
It was also relevant in the context of post-colonial African politics, which is traditionally seen as being plagued by one-party dominance, tribal rivalries and personal fiefdoms. It was an act of defiance against those who claim that blind loyalty to the liberation party is somehow an inherently African characteristic. Finally, and quite coincidentally, it saw Africa’s youngest political party challenge the continent’s oldest liberation movement at the poll.
Developments on the international scene also played a role in putting Cope in the spotlight. While the disaffected leaders who would later form Cope were holding secret meetings in smoky boardrooms to discuss their uncertain future, Barack Obama, on the other side of the globe, was pulling off one of the most incredible election victories in American history. His campaign demonstrated the value of grassroot support (on which Cope would later rely), and his enchanting oratory created a world-wide atmosphere of hope (an effect Cope would later try to emulate). Obama’s campaign was closely observed in many parts of Africa and particularly, given his heritage, in Kenya. Later in the same year, the governing party in Ghana was defeated at the polls in a historical election which was almost too close to call. When America elected a black president, suddenly anything seemed to be possible. Surely South Africans could also now vote for … well … not the ANC! Change was certainly in the air.
Hence the emergence of a splinter movement out of the ruling ANC occurred against a complicated historical backdrop at the southern tip of a continent struggling to come to grips with independence, and with an optimistic world looking anxiously on. All these factors contributed to the hype.
And there certainly was a disproportionate amount of hype around Cope. Throughout 2008 it was almost impossible to open a newspaper without reading about what was initially called the ‘Mbeki camp’, then ‘Shikota’ – the nickname for Shilowa and Lekota’s movement – and eventually Cope. In the weeks leading up to the election, I recorded between 40 and 70 newspaper articles referring to the party every single day. Cope featured in nearly every opinion column, on every radio talk show and in every news bulletin. Judging by the excitement, it was difficult not to believe that the Congress of the People was about to win the election, or at least come very close to doing so.
Cope fascinated me from the very start. That night in October 2008 when I heard Mbhazima Shilowa mention that a convention was to be held as the next step towards the formation of a new political party, I knew that I had to be there.
Checking it out on the Internet I was surprised to find that there was an application process for the convention. The application form contained a tricky question: ‘Which organisation or region do you represent?’ Mmm, well. Given that this was probably the question which would determine whether I was to be admitted into the fold or left out in the cold, I thought it wise to do better than just answer ‘none’. But how does one come to represent a region? I was certainly not distinguished enough to represent Gauteng, or even Johannesburg. Neither could I imagine who, apart from the mayor or local councillors, would qualify – not that I expected too many of them to attend. That left me with the option of representing an organisation. The only one I could think of was a youth organisation whose annual conference I had attended once. (In my defence, I did afterwards email the president of the organisation to ask for permission.)
Lo and behold, I was invited to attend. All I had to do was pick up my accreditation form and arrive at Sandton Convention Centre at 9am on the Saturday morning, to the envy of my sister who had also applied to attend but, representing ‘no one’, had been rejected. I was bubbling with excitement and for the rest of the week struggled through the intricacies of bond pricing. There were other, far bigger things on my mind.
I was such a political virgin, and it showed. Expecting registration to start on time, I arrived at a shambolic Field and Study Centre in Parkmore on the Friday evening before the convention with little patience and much puzzlement. It looked more like a bring-and-braai than a registration process. Why was the queue not moving? Why were people sleeping in buses? And why were people singing Thabo Mbeki songs when he was old news? And, most importantly, were they going to check my organisational affiliation and expose me as a hoax? I had much to learn.
Waiting in the stagnant queue with about 50 other people, I started suspecting trouble when an official-looking person emerged at half-hour intervals, shouted twenty-odd random names (usually without eliciting any response), and disappeared again. I had read earlier that 6 000 people were expected at the convention. It didn’t require complicated arithmetic to figure out that this could turn out to be a long night. Apparently I wasn’t alone in this realisation, because before long the impatient amongst us had forced our way into the little room where the action was supposed to be taking place.
The room looked as though it had been hit by a paper bomb explosion. Accreditation forms were scattered everywhere, while a few shell-shocked volunteers were desperately trying to locate people’s forms one at a time. Imagine trying to locate Sipho Nghona or Michiel le Roux’s accreditation form from amongst 6 000 randomly scattered forms. The process would have taken not hours